My travel diaries
Tuesday 22 May, 2007 - Bardia National Park, Nepal
A fun-packed day which, with hindsight, seems slightly surreal. After waking up with coffee around dawn, Tina, Siling and I spend the morning on foot safari looking for tigers. Before we set out Uttam insists the owner of the lodge fetches me an umbrella to shade me from the sun. He comes back with a cumbersome curly-handled specimen inscribed with butterflies, which wouldn't normally be my style. "Is this for fending off the rhinos?" I ask. The others get given broad bamboo sticks instead.
Our guide begins by explaining the safety procedure when confronted with dangerous wild animals. "If you see a tiger, stay calm and don't panic. Just keep still and stare at it. If you're chased by a rhino, just climb a small tree."
"How about if you see an elephant?" I ask. I have a vague suspicion an angry wild bull elephant wouldn't have any difficulty uprooting a small tree should I decide to seek refuge up it.
"Run," the guide replies, somewhat unhelpfully
"Is that all?"
"Well, if you have a handkerchief, you can drop it on the ground as you run. The elephant might stop and sniff it, giving you chance to escape." Practical advice, indeed. I particularly like the bit about staying calm if you see a tiger.
I start the walk in a certain amount of trepidation, but this is quickly dispelled as we walk deeper into the national park. The terrain is varied as we pass through sal forest, grasslands and alongside jungle river banks. We see a great many colourful birds - chestnut-headed bee eaters, white-fronted kingfishers, a serpent eagle which leaves a dead snake in a tree after biting its head off, and a grey-headed hornbill among them. There are plenty of spotted deer and swamp deer to be seen grazing in the long grasses, but we see no tigers. We eat breakfast at a popular tiger watering hole beside a river bank. The guide suggests I climb a tree to get a better view. I do so obediently, but end up in a tangle of branches from where I can't see anything at all. Even so, it's an interesting walk, and we return to Bardia Jungle Cottages confident we'll see tigers at some point before the week is out.
At lunchtime I'm entertained by the first of Uttam and Tina's many heated political discussions about the state of Nepal. Uttam tells us about the 1975 Sikkim referendum, where the population of the small independent state bordering the far northeast of India unexpectedly voted to become a part of its giant neighbour. He says that there are so many Indian people flooding into the Terai region of Nepal now, that if the Nepalese held a similar referendum, they too would vote to become part of India.
After lunch we visit the nearby crocodile breeding centre, where marsh mugger and gharial crocodiles are bred in captivity before being released into the Karnali river system. On the way out Tina and I spot a rhino running past the national park entrance gates. All excited, we stand nervously on a footbridge over a stream taking photographs as it passes right underneath us. I look around and take careful note of a small tree nearby I can hurriedly climb up should it leave the stream and decide to head towards us. We're very pleased with ourselves, but then Siling arrives and tells us it's a tame rhino, and he can remember feeding bananas to it when it used to be kept by the wardens at Chitwan National Park, closer to Kathmandu.
Later that evening, Uttam introduces us to another of his Bardia contacts, the commanding officer of the nearby army barracks, whom he introduces only as "the colonel". He is a very young man, taciturn but cheerful, and I estimate him to be in his late twenties or early thirties. Somewhat embarrassingly, I am then introduced to him as "the Everest conqueror - look, you can still see the burns on his face."
The colonel takes us for a spin at high speed around the jungle in his Toyota Landcruiser. We watch swamp deer fly past the window, and Siling mistakes a termite mound for an elephant. The swamp deer is another species whose numbers have reduced drastically in Nepal due to its habitat of reed beds and tall grasses being destroyed for farmland and thatch, and to see a flying one makes us feel privileged. Arriving back at the army compound, a group soldiers on parade stop what they're doing and salute our vehicle. We end up drinking G&T and Tuborg on the colonel's lawn under the stars. Beers keep appearing, and Tina tries to spark a conversation about the political situation, but the colonel is keeping quiet. Towards the end of the evening they start asking me how many times I've climbed Everest. The colonel says he has great respect for me risking my life to achieve my ambition, at which point I feel compelled to spill the beans and explain to him that I only went as far as the North Col, and besides a man who's spent the last ten years of his life fighting the Maoists, my achievements are trivial. Some time after 10 o'clock we're given a torchlit escort out of the army compound by a company of soldiers all the way back to Bardia Jungle Cottages, where I go to sleep wondering whether I've dreamt the whole day up.Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Next
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